


handheld sunshine

by deniigiq



Series: Blindspot and the Ordeal of Being Known [5]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Break Up, Cheering Up, Gen, Matt and Foggy are vicious, Office, Peter VS the IT Dept, Pranks and Practical Jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:56:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23092957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: SC:where are you?LW:oh you know.LW:in my carLW:weeping(Sam's coworker breaks up with her boyfriend. Sam does what he can to cheer her up.)
Relationships: Samuel Chung & Kirsten McDuffie & Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Samuel Chung & Peter Parker, Samuel Chung & his friends
Series: Blindspot and the Ordeal of Being Known [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658656
Comments: 16
Kudos: 410





	handheld sunshine

**Author's Note:**

> all Sam's friends are girls, this speaks to me. 
> 
> References to abusive relationships (mostly verbal, non-graphic) below, please do what you need to do look after yourselves!

Sam was the first to admit that he didn’t have a whole lot of guy friends. Like, 90% of his flock were women. Hannah, Leilani, Jia, Zebaniah, Lindsey, Sara, Chunhua—the list went on and on.

Matt said that he had the opposite problem. Most of his gal friends were, in some shape or form, his exes, so he tended to have a wide circle of guy friends around him.

Foggy and Kirsten did not have this problem. Kirsten said it was probably because both Sam and Matt had been raised in single-parent households with people who were possibly not well-adjusted.

Matt slammed a hand on the table and said he would not stand for his father’s anxiety and bad decisions to be insulted in such a way.

Kirsten asked him where he’d learned how to pace when he was panicking and Matt said that he would not stand for any _other_ of his father’s anxiety habits and decisions to be insulted in such a way.

He was self-conscious about the pacing.

Foggy told Sam that Matt was a special, layered case of generations of emotional repression and so was an outlier in this study, but that Sam probably made girl friends easier because he’d grown up in a mostly female household.

That made sense.

Hannah told him later that he was an idiot for not realizing it sooner and after he hung up on her the first time, she relented that she _guessed_ that it was occasionally hard to see the forest for the trees.

“You’re just friendly, Sam,” she sighed. “Girls like guys who are just friendly. It’s the lowest bar and you would be shocked at the number of people who don’t even reach that.”

Well.

Not necessarily.

Sam wasn’t shocked because he spent his nights beating the shit out of these people. He had a fairly good idea of how many of them were stupid enough to try to pull their tricks in the street.

“Yeah, but you said it yourself, bro. Those are just the stupid ones,” Hannah lectured. “Think of all the smart ones. They hide their colors until you’re comfortable or vulnerable and then BAM. Creep city.”

Hmph.

“Sam, don’t go fight people about that.”

HMPH.

“Sam, seriously. Just a statement. Not a battle cry.”

They’d see about that.

“No, we won’t,” Hannah said, “Hey, are you going back to the Doc soon?”

Oh, right.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “My eyes have been haywire. Been seeing double lately.”

Hannah’s silence suggested she did not appreciate his blasé tone.

“Should be fine,” Sam said. “Doesn’t happen when the prosthetics aren't in, so it’s something wrong with them, not me.”

“Or it’s something wrong with you,” Hannah said sharply.

Sam huffed.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he promised.

Hannah didn’t believe him.

“Tell me how it goes,” she said.

“Kay. Tell me about your classes,” Sam said, stuffing the phone between his shoulder and cheek. “You started this week, no? Are they good? Are they fun? Can I steal your ID card and go in your name?”

Hannah did not laugh, not because Sam was not _hilarious_ , but because she had spent years cultivating a strong resistance to his humor.

“They’re boring, dude,” she said, “It’s all still just introductory stuff.”

Sam tried not to smile at the mess of metal on his desktop.

“Tell me about it anyways,” he said, swallowing around a thick throat at the thought of a twelve-year-old Hannah ripping back the curtain he’d wrapped around his bunk of their childhood bunkbed at home and screaming ‘I’m gonna destroy the boys at school. I’m gonna be better and smarter than _all_ of them. I’m gonna go to college and I’m gonna fight cancer and win and they’re gonna be no-good, do-nothin’s in their mamas’ basements. Right, Sam?”

And like.

Duh.

Obviously.

That was his sister. Of course she was going to cure cancer.

Now, she was more into architecture, yeah, that was true. But that didn’t mean she still wasn’t going to be the best of all of them.

She was his sister.

He got a text from Leilani that said simply ‘I need a hero Sam.’

He did a U-turn in the middle of the pavement back towards the office and found it closed up.

**SC:** where are you?

 **LW:** oh you know.

 **LW:** in my car

 **LW:** weeping

Yikes.

Leilani’s boyfriend was trash and Sam didn’t know how to tell her this in any other way besides ‘you are too good for him.’ She got defensive if he directly attacked the guy by pointing out that he never complimented Leilani and picked at her weight all the fucking time.

All the time.

Sam had seen the text messages.

He’d tried to fight this guy on multiple occasions, but Leilani had told him to chill out, she didn’t like it when guys raised their voices around her.

He’d vibrated in fury instead.

Achara’s lack of brain-to-mouth filter was unusually helpful in this area. She’d simply said, “Girl, _why_? I mean, like. Why? He’s obviously a piece of shit who doesn’t love you as much as you love him, so what exactly are you getting out of this?”

Sam thought that that had triggered something in Leilani’s head. She’d been texting with glossy eyes during her breaks over the last couple of days.

Matt had noticed. And when the old guy noticed, that meant it was time for an intervention before he did it for you.

Sam just wished that had happened somewhere a little more gentle than a 2000 Civic parked on a curb in the fog.

He sighed.

Leilani sighed with him.

“I thought maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough,” she admitted.

Sam handed her phone back to her.

“I’m sorry, you don’t deserve this,” he said.

Leilani rested the heels of her palms on the wheel. A single tear slipped off her cheek. Sam only caught sight of it because the street light ahead of them was piercingly bright.

He leaned back in the passenger’s seat and chewed a lip.

“You want me to…?” he tried.

“No,” Leilani said immediately. She softened. “No. I’m just tired of the fighting.”

Right.

“Sensei’ll fuck ‘im up and we can pretend it was an accident?” Sam offered. “He’d do that for you. I saw him go steal a guy’s girl outside a bar once in the horns ‘cause he didn’t like how he was talkin’ to her.”

Leilani chuffed a little laugh.

“I don’t need Daredevil, thanks,” she said. “I just—maybe something _is_ wrong with me.”

Oh, hell no.

“Sam—”

No, no.

Sam wasn’t hearing that.

“The only thing that’s wrong with you is that you let people like this walk all over you,” Sam said sharply. “But this? This isn’t your fault. This is his. He’s a piece of shit, Leilani. Not you. Take it from me, I’ve seen my fair share of absolute assholes. They like to punch me.”

Leilani giggled.

Score.

“I don’t want to go home,” she admitted. “My mom’s gonna be so disappointed. She really likes him, you know.”

Sam bounced a knee.

“Okay,” he said. “So come home with me. The Olds won’t mind. They’re locked on the game right now. You can take my room and I’ll take the living room.”

“I couldn’t—” Leilani started.

Sam stared at her. Deep, deep into her eyes.

“Sam,” She said, “I don’t have any clothes.”

“I live with lawyers. They can afford this thing called a ‘washing machine.’”

She giggled a little hysterically this time and sucked in a deep breath around a sob.

“Guests?” Matt called downstairs over the dog’s alarmed barking as soon as Sam unlocked the door.

He knew who it was. He was just being polite.

“Friend,” Sam called back upstairs. “Breakup.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Matt announced.

Leilani wrapped a hand over her face to stifle the laughing.

“Can I use the couch?” Sam asked.

“Ask the Boss,” Matt said.

“Foggy?” Sam called a little louder, since Foggy did not have super hearing and was probably neck-deep in baseball at the moment. “Can I use the couch?”

He got nothing.

“That’s a ‘yes,’” Matt reported.

“See? No problems,” Sam assured Leilani.

“What are they doing?” Leilani whispered. “The series just ended.”

“They’re clarifying a sticking point,” Sam told her. He unlocked his door and held it open.

“What kind of sticking point?” she asked.

Sam stared at her.

“Right. No baseball, my bad,” she said.

“Y’all are maniacs,” Sam said. “Get in. We have feelings to discuss.”

Leilani was taken aback by Sam’s untamed collection of tools and sheet metal. He told her not to worry about it. He was just doing some tests, no biggie.

“Tests of what?” she asked, settling onto the edge of his bed.

“Oh, you know. Magnetism,” Sam explained. “Currents, really. I’m trying to work out—uh. It’s, um.”

Leilani lifted her eyes to him. They were still a little pink.

“It’s okay, Sam,” she said. “You can go full-nerd. I need the distraction.”

“Are you sure?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Leilani said. “I’m sure.”

“Okay, well. Let it be known that you had an out,” Sam told her. “So the problem I’m having is about power efficiency.”

Leilani’s asshole ex-boyfriend came to the office. Came _to_ the office. As in, he, and his grubby-ass mitts, walked over the threshold of Nelson, Murdock & McDuffie like he owned the place. He walked right up to Leilani answering phones at the front desk and put his hands on her in front of the whole. Fucking. Office.

Sam was livid.

Matt, who has mid-interrogation of Sam over the Kingston case, grabbed him just in time and told him to stand _down_. He said it in the DD tone, not the teacher one. He left the backroom and Sam went after him to glare from the door.

“Sir,” Matt called over the commotion outside, “Might I ask what you think you’re doing to my employee?”

The Dickwad tried to say that he needed to talk to Leilani.

Matt didn’t think that he did.

Matt thought that he needed to leave.

The Dickwad told him that he had no right to tell him what to do.

Matt asked him if he was aware he was talking to an attorney of criminal law. This, for some reason, gave the guy pause.

“I would appreciate it if you left my employee alone immediately,” Matt said with a sharp smile. “Because I’m afraid that while I pride myself on keeping innocent people out of jail, I am, unfortunately, _very_ good at getting guilty people chucked into it. Do we understand?”

The dickwad sneered at him and told Leilani to text him after work. He left. Matt huffed.

“Oh, honey,” Kirsten said, finally coming out of her office all the way into the room.

Leilani groaned and covered her face.

Kirsten took Leilani upstairs to talk her down. Matt and Foggy met in Foggy’s office to discuss things.

Sam seethed at his desk.

Achara, once clients had been settled, came back to sit on the edge of it and watch him.

“We should have called the cops,” she said.

“We’re not calling the cops,” Sam told her more harshly than intended.

Achara sniffed.

“Why not?” she asked. “That had to be intimidation, if not battery.”

Sam ground his teeth.

“We aren’t helping put another brown person in jail just because they’ve got anger issues,” he growled. “That’s not fair. That doesn’t help anyone here.”

Achara hummed.

“Okay,” she said after a moment, “So what do we do then?”

Oh, Sam had many ideas.

Thumbscrews.

A broken jaw.

Finally getting sensei to wear a Halloween mask under the horns for a super dramatic and traumatic reveal.

“We build Leilani up,” he said, “So that that asshole can’t bring her down.”

Achara pursed her lips.

Step one: distraction. Make the friend laugh _constantly_.

Achara told Sam he was embarrassing. Sam told her that if he could make Hannah crack, then he could make Leilani cry of laughter.

He cranked up the ‘idiot’ to eleven.

Matt caught him standing anxiously over the printer he was about to break and just stood there in the doorway for a while, evaluating him. Foggy peeked around his arm and lifted an eyebrow in silence.

Sensei could smell misbehavior from miles away. Sam stared at him, waiting for the impending scolding.

But it didn’t come.

“Channel Spidey,” Matt said after the longest five seconds of Sam’s life.

“Go hard, kid,” Foggy agreed.

Sam nearly deflated in relief.

“Can do,” he said.

He broke the printer. He really hammed it up. Carried on using it even though it was just about screaming. Leilani must have heard the thing’s cries for help telepathically because she came rushing in and found Sam standing over a very, very hot machine.

“What are you doing to my child?” she demanded.

Oh, you know.

Just some copying.

He was banned from the copy machine for the day. Leilani couldn’t look at him without her lips twitching.

He took the opportunity to take her turn to go fetch office coffee for lunch as a ‘kind gesture.’ He brought back everyone’s orders and handed Foggy his. Foggy didn’t look at it, he said thank you and took a sip before choking.

Matt lit up like Christmas.

The joy on his face was unparalleled.

Everyone carefully looked back towards Foggy’s frozen frame.

“Samuel,” Foggy said slowly. “This has salt in it.”

“This is a dream,” Matt announced. “A karmic dream. We have finally been blessed by Prof. Volker’s spirit and for the first time, it was not me who has suffered his folly. Oh, happy day!”

Foggy grimaced as he bumbled off excitedly for the files in the backroom. Kirsten’s face contorted in pain as she tried to remain sympathetic.

“I’m sure it was an accident, Fogs,” she said.

“HAPPY DAY,” Matt called from the backroom.

Foggy slowly lowered the coffee. He set it purposefully on the supply table.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Someone’s gotten too comfortable.”

The air he left the front desk with was nothing short of menacing.

“Oh, he’s gonna go fuck Matt up,” Kirsten said. “Get your phones out, children, we’re about to see some divine retribution.”

Foggy’s revenge over the next day looked like viciously crunching through bags of Cheetos and Doritos. Sam didn’t even know if he was enjoying himself, but he was certainly committed to the act. He stood outside Matt’s closed door and just gnoshed away.

Sam had never seen Matt so tense.

He opened his door and stood, looming right in Foggy’s face.

Foggy crunched more purposefully than ever.

“And so it begins,” Kirsten said.

Sam had thought that he would be the agent of chaos making Leilani feel better here.

But no.

No, no.

He had underestimated Matt and Foggy’s many old smoldering feuds.

Foggy took all the staplers in the office and lined them up on the edge of his desk and he watched people like a hawk when they came in to use one.

Sam got the feeling that he emptied them as soon as people left because they always seemed to need refilling and Fogs wouldn’t let anyone touch the cup of unused staple bits that usually lived on the supply table behind the front desk. No. They had to get a new length out of one of his hoarded staple boxes and break that one in half.

Matt caught onto this after Sam handed him a file that was a little too heavy to be full of loose paper.

He couldn’t find the stapler. Leilani hesitantly informed him that Foggy had it.

Matt blinked.

“He already has one,” he said.

“He’s got all of them,” Achara said flatly.

Matt went a little pale with realization.

Sam, Achara and Leilani watched him approach Foggy’s office.

He stood in front of the desk. Foggy stared up at him silently, expectantly.

“Did you need something, husband?” he asked.

“Stapler,” Matt said.

“Take your pick,” Foggy said. “All from ten to two at the edge of the desk.”

Matt did not take a stapler.

“Fogs,” he said.

“Here, take this one,” Foggy said, plucking a green victim out of his collection. Matt shut up. He took the stapler.

It did not staple.

“Hm, must be empty,” Foggy said malevolently.

“Fogs—” Matt said.

“Here, don’t you worry, bud, I got you.”

Foggy brought out one of his boxes of bars of staples. He picked one out of the box and leaned on his elbows on the desk seriously.

He snapped it in half.

Matt winced.

Foggy inserted the half bar into the stapler and handed it back to Matt sweetly.

“For you, darling,” he said.

“Fogs—”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got more.”

Matt winced harder than ever.

“Can I—can I have the, uh. The leftov—”

“Oh, you mean _these_ leftovers?” Foggy asked, dumping the cup with his collection of unused halves all over his desk.

Matt grimaced so hard a muscle in his jaw jumped. Foggy picked up a handful of the released staples and sprinkled them slowly onto his desk surface.

“These. Staples. Matthew?” he asked.

Sam had no idea what was going on here, but he got the feeling that this was another argument from the New York office. Perhaps even a ‘bad sound, bad sound’ thing for Matt.

“Boys,” Kirsten called, “Play nice. We don’t have to be petty to express ourselves.”

“Wasteful,” Matt hissed.

“Who is?” Foggy demanded immediately.

“Boys,” Kirsten repeated.

“I want to know what their old office looked like,” Achara said at lunch. “Like, what were they like when they were younger? Did they cellophane each others’ desks or something?”

No…but Sam had gleaned between Karen’s tears of laughter once that they’d all spent multiple days pretending desperately that none of them were hungover. They’d all thought that by refusing to acknowledge that anyone was on the verge of vomiting, they could will it into being.

She’d also said something about Foggy consistently filling Matt’s desk drawers with packing peanuts when he pissed him off.

Leilani didn’t say anything, but she was texting a friend with a huge grin.

So, like, mission accomplished?

Matt and Foggy’s prank war was escalating. It was getting a little bit out of hand. Foggy had glued everything on Matt’s desk to it and Matt, in retaliation, had swapped out his desk file drawer with Foggy’s and then locked it.

He’d then printed all Foggy’s briefings in braille.

Foggy brought the Daredevil helmet to work and Matt panicked, found it and stuffed it, horrified, into his bag. Foggy stole it the next night and repeated this process again and again, which led to Matt surreptitiously scouring the office every morning for a week to find it and hide it before anyone saw it.

They were kind of dicks to each other.

Sam was impressed.

“Aw, just like old times,” Kirsten said from her perfectly safe, untouched office.

“Old times?” Leilani asked.

“Yeah,” Kirsten said, “Just replace Foggy with me.”

Ah.

Terrifying.

Sam knew that Leilani had gotten over the hump when he got a call from Spidey while at work. He hadn’t noticed his phone buzzing through a string of increasingly desperate texts, but when he did, it was too late.

Spidey was in full manic meltdown.

His texts were just keyboard smashes.

“Woah,” Leilani said, peeking over his shoulder. “What’s that about?”

Excel, apparently.

“LOOK AT IT,” Spidey shrieked from behind his phone. He didn’t need to be seen on video chat, he just needed Sam to see his perfectly innocuous desktop with a perfectly innocuous grid on its face.

“Dude,” Sam said carefully. “Do you think maybe you are overreacting a little? Don’t you guys have IT?”

“LOOK. AT. IT,” Spidey’s voice labored on, to Leilani’s bemusement. “Watch. No. WATCH, SAM. Watch.”

A shaking finger entered the screen and pressed the down arrow key on the keyboard.

The whole grid went teal.

“Oh, _nice_ ,” Sam said.

The finger tapped the arrow again and the screen went magenta. Then orange. Then black.

“I’m gonna cry,” Spidey whimpered. “I’m gonna cry. I’m gonna cry. It hurts me. Look at it. I’ve been here for EIGHT HOURS, SAMUEL.”

Sam didn’t know what to tell him.

“Call IT,” he said.

“Not on my fucking life,” Spidey snapped. “Those bastards ain’t touching nothin’, you hear me? Nothing. I’ll die first. I’ll die, don’t tempt me—”

Hm.

“Hey, Pete,” he said. “Can you touch it again? Just so that I can, you know, get an idea of what else it’s doing?”

Spidey made a sound a little like Gollum muttering to himself and slowly edged another finger towards the keyboard. He pressed the left side arrow and the whole screen went blue. He swore. Leilani scream-laughed silently into her palms.

“I’m—calling a priest,” Spidey decided. “This is priest territory. Where’s—where’s Red? He’s not answering his phone. Tell him to give me his old priest’s number.”

“I dunno, man,” Sam said. “I don’t think it’s cursed—”

“It’s cursed,” Spidey asserted.

“It’s not cursed,” Sam said.

“No, it’s _definitely cursed_ ,” Spidey said. “You—just—hold it, right there. Imma show you, don’t move.”

The phone camera traveled out of his office and into the office next door where a woman with blond hair piled haphazardly all over her head was staring emptily into a very familiar grid.

“Move,” Spidey said.

The woman moved like she was a puppet on strings.

Spidey tapped her down arrow.

They both screamed as the screen went green, glitched horrifically into static and then went black.

“Is it…gone?” the woman finally whimpered.

Spidey abandoned her to go pound on the next office door. He opened it. A person with blue hair in a labcoat threw themselves at their desktop.

“Don’t touch it,” the person hissed. “Don’t you fucking _touch it_.” 

Spidey left this office for the next one.

The person in that one locked their door rather than opening it.

“I’m onto you, Leo,” Spidey threatened that door. He left it to go open another one with a woman wearing a hijab in it. Her desktop was covered with coat.

“It’s not there,” this woman said immediately. Her desk was overflowing in printed out grids.

“IT did this,” Spidey whispered.

“Don’t speak of them,” the woman said. “And don’t let Mr. Stark catch you filming.”

There was more Gollum muttering as Spidey went back to his office. He finally, finally reversed the phone’s camera so that Sam and Leilani could see his face. He went stricken upon realizing that he hadn’t just been talking to Sam.

“Oh—shi—hi,” he said.

Sam smiled and gestured to Leilani.

“Coworker,” he said.

“Right—of course,” Spidey said. He cleared his throat. “We are a very professional company, Ms. Uh.”

“Washio,” Sam said.

Spidey cleared his throat again.

“I like your sneakers,” Leilani said.

Spidey paused in his panicking .

“You—oh. Thanks, I found ‘em at Marshalls for like half-off and—WAIT, NO. I’m dying, Sam, what do I do?”

Leilani giggled harder than ever.

“You should talk to your IT department about it,” Sam said.

Spidey seethed.

“They will not set foot on this floor, so help me god,” he said.

“Dude,” Sam said. “I’m literally positive that this is their doing. Excel doesn’t do any of that without programming, you know this. I know this. They’re fucking with you guys, so you should make them fix it.”

Spidey went irritable, then unbearably sad. He looked just like a puppy. A scruffy puppy in a white coat.

“I didn’t even do anything to them,” he said. “They’re all mad at Dr. Siemons, not us. We don’t deserve this. She’s not even in right now. She hasn’t been here for week.”

“You could report it to Stark?” Sam tried.

Spidey stared.

“He will laugh,” he said. “He always laughs. He finds joy in our suffering and misery. That’s why he put in the holo-wall. Just to fuck with us.”

“Holo-wall?” Leilani asked.

Spidey winced.

“It’s a computer,” he said. “But it’s a wall. As in, it’s not really a wall, it’s just a wall-shaped computer. But not like, a desktop. Like, one of his computers. It’s all a hologram. But the rest of us are mere bean-brained mortals, so we keep walking around it. Even though it’s not a wall or even there. This is his idea of comedy.”

Incredible.

“Call IT,” Sam said.

Spidey groaned like the thought alone hurt him.

“I’m at work, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” Sam said.

Spidey had gone despondent, all laid out over his desk.

“Bye,” Sam said.

“Bye,” Leilani echoed.

Spidey sighed.

Sam hung up and bounced his eyebrows at Leilani.

“Glamorous, no?” he asked.

“Maybe the man I need is in New York,” she replied.

Sam balked.

“Excuse you,” he said. “I am standing right here.”

She laughed.

“I know,” she said, “But one day you’ll leave.”

Aw.

Aw, girl, no.

“When I leave, you’ll just have to come visit me,” Sam told her brightly. “You can stay with me and my sister in our shithole apartment. You can watch her scream at our neighbors down the hall at 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s really something. It’ll really give you the real New York experience.”

Leilani made a show of considering it.

“I do love screaming at people,” she said. She hummed. “Hey, by the way, was that Spiderman?”

Goddamnit.

“Girl, we are having a moment,” Sam scolded.

“Yeah, and I get that, but his voice is nothing like I imagined it would be.”

“A moment, Leilani,” Sam said. “Stop fantasizing about men.”

“I dunno what I thought it would be like, but like? Maybe it’s higher than I thought? I think I’d still tap that, though.”

“Leilani.”

“Hey, Spiderman shops at Marshalls.”

“ _Leilani_.”

She smiled beatifically at him.

“Yes, coworker?” she asked.

Wow.

Yeah, she was gonna be just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Prof Volker is the guy from **Relativity** in the Inimitable Series who Matt and Foggy pranked in court, in case you weren't aware.


End file.
